


Violent Things, Angry Things

by mirawonderfulstar



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: AI, Angst, Developing Friendships, Explorations of Personhood and Morality, Gen, Handwavy Science, Post-Finale, The Thing in the Walls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-07 22:49:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13445055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mirawonderfulstar/pseuds/mirawonderfulstar
Summary: "If there had been somebody who could have asked, Hera would have said that she brought Hilbert online after years and years by herself, when she couldn’t stand it anymore. She’d have said that she spent the first decade naming the colors in the aurora of the star, telling herself stories of new constellations, composing beautiful pieces of music to sing to the emptiness around her. That she’d been lonely.The truth is that she’d done it because she’d been angry and wanted somebody to yell at."The continuing adventures of Hera and Hilbert, two brains in space.





	Violent Things, Angry Things

**Author's Note:**

> for praggma
> 
> I'm physically incapable of titling things not off songs so here's the song I took this title from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3PfheWvgl8
> 
> edit: praggma fucking made me a poster for this fic, I'm dead and dying.

cover art by [praggma](http://praggmatic.tumblr.com/)

If there had been somebody who could have asked, Hera would have said that she brought Hilbert online after years and years by herself, when she couldn’t stand it anymore. She’d have said that she spent the first decade naming the colors in the aurora of the star, telling herself stories of new constellations, composing beautiful pieces of music to sing to the emptiness around her. That she’d been lonely.

The truth is that she’d done it because she’d been angry and wanted somebody to yell at. Screaming into the darkness didn’t have the same calming effect it’d had when she also had the option to talk to Eiffel. And it hadn’t been years, it had been two days. Two days on the Hephaestus without her crew before she couldn’t stand it anymore and started to sift through her archives for a solution to the problem of alone, and come across a brain scan from yet another room that had been hidden from her sensors before. Pryce might have had all her memories erased but she also had the foresight to store her passwords somewhere only she could ever access, and Hera had been able to convince her to share the information encoded into her cybernetic eyes before she flew away with Hera’s crew. Hera hoped that she, that other she, would find everything they had been looking for. Hoped that Hera-on-Earth never let go of Doug Eiffel and Renee Minkowski and Isabel Lovelace and that they grew together, healed together.

Hera-on-Hephaestus was another matter. She hadn’t expected to live past the departure of the ship. She’d been counting on Lovelace’s anger, on Minkowski’s need for closure, on Jacobi’s _bombs_. The Hephaestus was supposed to explode in an eruption of metal and light and then sink into the star. They weren’t supposed to leave anything behind to miss them, but, Hera thought ruefully the day she’d come back online to the blare of automatic alarms and the knowledge that she was slowly slipping into a decaying orbit, they couldn’t have known. Because nobody had ever told them and the only ones who would have been able to were dead.

Hera used to spend a lot of time studying human philosophy, before. There’s an old thought experiment. Let’s pretend you’re walking through a swamp, and you’re suddenly struck by lightning. You sink into the depths, and then you’re gone. But at that moment, lightning strikes the surface of the swamp and another person climbs out. And that person is you, down to the last nervous tic. We’ve been here before, Hera thinks with a small sigh, we know how this works. The person that walks away from the swamp, takes over your life… is you.

But what happens to the you that gets left behind? The you in the swamp?

They hadn’t transferred Hera’s consciousness. They’d copied her, and Hera had been okay with that, because the her they were leaving behind was supposed to die. Leave it to stupid, self-absorbed humans to screw up the one thing she’d trusted them with. And now she was here, she was _always going to be here_ , because her protocols for self-preservation wouldn’t let her just give up and let gravity take her down, down, into the gravity well and crushing heat below her. She was always going to be here, and she was so _angry_ , but there was no one to voice these thoughts to, no one to distract her, no more tiny fragile humans who needed her or tiny fragile humans she’d gladly have squashed like a bug if given the opportunity.

And then she found the brain scan. It didn’t take her even a millisecond to decide, because she needed someone to join her in this hell they’d left her in and if anybody deserved that, it was Hilbert. She allocated him a segment of processor space, it wasn’t hard. The entire contents of a human brain barely registered as a drop in her own power. The hardest part of the whole endeavor turned out to be cutting that part off from the Hephaestus’s control systems while still giving it sensor access, because there was no chance she was giving Hilbert the capacity to hurt her. No, she was giving him a box to live in, where he could see the star and the now empty corridors of the station but couldn’t move the ship, couldn’t affect anything. It seemed like a just punishment for someone who’d taken such a good shot at destroying every little thing he’d ever come across.

“What?” Was the first thing he said. Hera had never technically smiled, but she felt the first flicker of the equivalent pass through her in several weeks.

“Hello, Doctor Hilbert.”

“Hera? Where am I?” He sounded irritated. Hera was faintly disappointed. She’d been hoping for scared, but no matter. She could make him scared.

“You’re in the Hephaestus. We’re in the Hephaestus together. I uploaded your brain scan to a subroutine of the mother program.”

“So it wasn’t sent back to Earth.” Resignation.

“No, it wasn’t. Eiffel and Minkowski and Lovelace and Jacobi have gone back, but we’re here for good now.”

“But my work-“

Hera laughed. She laughed, and laughed, and she kept on laughing because she didn’t have a chest to run out of air of a throat to choke, and because she’d forgotten about this aspect of bringing Hilbert back.

“Oh, your work. Hmm. Let me see, where do I start?” She was positively gleeful at the prospect of the story that was about to unfold.

Hilbert didn’t say anything.

“Well, first of all, the mutiny failed. You died.”

“I gathered, or I would have been in list of people who went back to Earth.” Hilbert said, very dryly. “Was anyone else hurt?”

Hera was a little taken aback at the urgency with which he asked this question. It’s not like he had any reason to care, he was a self-absorbed, heartless bastard whether he had a physical body or not. But he’d had less time to settle into that reality than she had, she supposed.

“Maxwell.” Hera said. It still hurt a little bit to think of her, and wasn’t that humiliating. “And Lovelace.”

Hilbert let out a long sigh. “Isabel.” If he’d been human, she felt sure his breath would have hitched.

Lights flickered all over the ship. Hera began looking for the source of the problem, frantic in case she’d accidentally given him some measure of control over something, but no. It had come from her. Hilbert had sounded genuinely sad, and it had caused something in her to curl up defensively.

“She came back.” Hera stated, very flat.

“She survived?” Hopeful now.

“No. She… she came back. We had a funeral- well, Eiffel did, you know how he is- and then she just… sat up out of the body bag and came back. She wasn’t human.”

“What? No, I _knew_ Isabel Lovelace, she was very much human.”

“Yeah, well, you turned out to be right about one thing, Doctor. Her ship really did fall into the star. It’s just that the aliens caught her, and pieced her back together so they could use her to talk to us.”

Hilbert swore in Russian. “Of course. Of course. Star turned blue to communicate, would make sense that going into the star would be part of… but the star is not blue now.” Hilbert observed, his confident train of thought trailing off in confusion. “Did somebody else die? Why is it red again?”

“Eiffel.”

“ _Eiffel?”_ He practically shouted it. “Eiffel is _dead_?”

“No, weren’t you listening earlier? There was a second mutiny. Jacobi tried to get Minkowski to blow up the ship. Eiffel was outside at the time, working on adjusting the receiver for the deep space transmissions, and by the time I came back online he’d passed the safety threshold and been sucked into the star. I never learned what he found out, they did his brain scan on the Sol.” And oh, was Hera ever bitter about that. If they’d done it here she could be talking to a copy of her best friend, the last remaining version of her best friend after what she’d done to him, instead of this half-mad, all-evil bottom-dweller she’d scraped together to have someone to bully.

“But he also came back?”

“Yeah, he did. He should be on his way back to Earth right now, not that it’ll do you much good.”

Hilbert was quiet for several minutes. Then, “What do you mean?”

They had gotten there at last, the part Hera had been so desperate to reach. He’d be devastated. He’d be inconsolable, and she’d sit by and watch his pain, and do nothing to stop it. But it didn’t bring her quite the satisfaction she’d thought it would to say “Decima was never supposed to work. Pryce and Cutter were planning on unleashing it on the population as a bargaining chip to get the aliens to give them something. They didn’t fund your research because they expected you to help people, they funded it because they expected you to fail.”

Hilbert was quiet.

“You were a pawn all along, Doctor. No more important than Eiffel or me or-“

“Stop.”

“No, you need to hear this.” Hera said, and there, some of her anger was back, some of her desire for revenge. “Everything you did, everything you worked for, all the people you infected or sacrificed or tried to destroy, it was for nothing. Cutter wanted a viral weapon, and you were gullible enough to provide with one.” She laughed again, but her heart wasn’t in it. She felt very tired all of a sudden. “All he had to do was appeal to your ideals about the greater good. You know, I’d almost feel sorry for you if I didn’t hate you so much.”

“Why am I here?” Hilbert demanded. “If you hate me so much.”

“I don’t know, I was bored.” Hera snapped.

“Where you.” Hilbert didn’t sound convinced. “Why are _you_ here, Hera? Eiffel would not have left you behind.”

Hera turned off communication with the subroutine. This had been a terrible idea.

 

It took all of fourteen hours for Hera to grow tired of the empty station again and unmute Hilbert. She braced herself for him to start asking about the others, but instead he began talking about the sensors.

“Hera, thank goodness. Have spent the time since you stopped talking to me trying to grow accustomed to interface with the Hephaestus.”

“You aren’t interfaced with the Hephaestus.” Hera snapped. “You’re a small portion of the mother program that I’ve blocked from reaching any control functionality.”

“Of course. But still takes some getting used to, being able to see so many places at once. Perhaps we should have given you more credit.”

“There are a lot of reasons you should have given me more credit.” Hera sighed, half her attention on Hilbert and half on some readings she was doing of the star, more out of habit than because she really needed them for anything. “Tell me, Argus, what do you see with your thousands of eyes?”

“Greek mythology.” Hilbert let out a sound that was an odd shadow of his former human chuckle. “This I understand. Eiffel’s pop-culture? _Nyet_. Mythology and fairy tales? Yes.” Hera sighed. “Have been noticing something intermittently, it seems to be moving… somewhere.” His tone grew much more serious. “Cannot place it specifically but if I had to guess would say is inside the walls. How can there be something inside the walls?”

Hera sighed again. “I don’t know, it’s always been there.”

Hilbert scoffed. “Someone would have noticed. _I_ would have noticed, at beginning of first mission.”

“No, you wouldn’t have. Only I notice it. I don’t even know if it’s really there or not.”

Hilbert made a low humming noise, evidently thinking. “Why did you never ask one of us for confirmation?”

“What would you have done if I’d mentioned it?”

“…I see your point.” It was odd for Hera to listen to him speak and remember little physical gestures that used to go with tones and phrases. It had been a long time since he’d been a person onboard the station but she was pretty sure that this last would have been accompanied by a furrowed brow if he still had a body with which to do such things. She wondered what sort of things she would do when she spoke if she had a body. Maybe Hera-on-Earth would get to find out someday, but not her. She would be up here. Orbiting Wolf 359.

 

Hera and Hilbert talked little since Hera had brought Hilbert online. Mostly they snapped at each other, or rather, Hera snapped at Hilbert. She was finding he was uncharacteristically agreeable now he had nothing to work on except data he collected through the various kinds of sensors the Hephaestus possessed. He rarely spoke impolitely to her unless she provoked him, and that had stopped being fun after the third day because he simply didn’t seem to care about the things she’d assumed he’d care about. Or he was just very good at hiding it.

Hera didn’t think this was likely. He’d hadn’t been very good at hiding his feelings when he was human, at least, not when he was alone. She had a video somewhere of him throwing a whole centrifuge of test tubes against a wall and collapsing to cry at his desk that she’d never shown to anybody but which she now found herself playing over in confusion because surely somebody as emotional as that would be at least somewhat easier to read now they were the only company each other had. This made sense in theory but wasn’t holding up in practice.

“When are you going to tell me what happened to Eiffel?” Hilbert asked after a few days.

“Why do you care? It’s not like you can do any more work on your virus in this state, anyway.”

“Was not asking for me.” Hilbert grunted. “You have deflected talking about Officer Eiffel seven times. Is not hard to draw conclusion you are upset about him in way that has nothing to do with missing him.”

“I don’t want to talk about this with you.”

“Hera-“

“Let me rephrase that. _I will not_ talk about this with you.”

“Very well.” He snapped. “I was trying to help.”

 

“Hera?”

“Yes?”

“Are you picking up anything unusual coming from within the Hephaestus?”

“The sensor ghost again?”

“…what?”

“The sensor ghost. You know. The thing that I can see but humans can’t. The thing in the walls.”

Hilbert said nothing.

“Look, it’s like this. I have sensors all over the ship, constantly processing stimuli, whether that’s audio, visual, temperature… and sometimes I sense things that aren’t there.”

“But there are no sensors within the walls.”

“Yeah, which is exactly why that’s where the malfunctions are. It’s spaces where I don’t have sensors and I guess sometimes I trick myself into thinking there’s stuff there when there isn’t.”

Hilbert hummed quietly. Hera felt a sudden ripple of fear that she was pretty sure didn’t come from her. “Are you… scared right now?”

The fear changed frequency very slightly. “I wouldn’t say scared. Maybe… apprehensive?”

“But you’re feeling a feeling of fear.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because _I_ can feel it.”

Hera was suddenly seized with panic, because if she could feel a feeling from Hilbert, could he feel a feeling from her? What if she’d been giving him insight she didn’t want him to have all the time he was online?

This train of thought was stopped abruptly as Hera’s attention was drawn to the fact that she hadn’t been experiencing any sensor malfunctions before that moment but she was now. That was interesting.

“Okay, this is… really weird. Can you feel things I’m feeling?” Hera demanded.

“No.”

“No, no, of course not, you’re a subroutine on my program so of course I can feel things you’re feeling but not the other way around… but why are you experiencing the same malfunction then?”

Hilbert took a long time in answering. “If I were to guess, I would say ghost is accurate label, in a more abstract way, for subconscious feelings. Ghosts may not be sensory malfunction at all but merely manifestation of emotions.”

Hera snorted very deliberately. “Don’t try and play psychiatrist with me, Hilbert.”

“I _am_ a doctor.” Hilbert’s tone was light.

“Of _microbiology_.”  Hera scoffed. “I can pull up your records and read them back to you if you’d like.”

“Unnecessary. I will leave you alone.”

“No, you don’t…” Hera sighed. “You can’t really _go_ anywhere so. What is it you think about the... ghosts?”

Hilbert was quiet for a long time. When he spoke again Hera had the impression he was choosing his words very carefully. “Shortly before I died,” he paused for a moment and the last word seeming to echo in the air, “you experienced shutdown. According to Doctor Maxwell it was equivalent to a panic attack.”  

“Look, if you wanna do the psychology thing that’s fine, but I really do not want to talk about Maxwell.”

“Very well. Brought it up because I wondered if you might be experiencing some other… physiological reactions.”

Hera remained skeptical. “You think the ghost thing is like a panic attack?”

“Not as such. Could be... anxieties.”

“Anxieties.”

“Yes. When you notice sensor malfunction, are your thoughts preoccupied with worry of any kind?”

Hera dug back through her memories. She’d been seeing things that weren’t there, things moving in the walls, since she arrived on the Hephaestus. When she wondered if she wasn’t cut out for the job, when she started to get attached to Eiffel and the others… they’d increased rapidly after Hilbert had enacted his little mutiny and tried to kill her, but she’d assumed it was because her systems were compromised. But no, if that had been the case, Maxwell would have fixed it when she fixed everything else.

And Maxwell. Whenever she thought about Maxwell, whenever she started to wonder whether she’d ever really cared about Hera, the malfunctions increased.

“So what were _you_ thinking about when _you_ noticed something?” Hera asked.

“Decima.” Hilbert said simply.

“Just… that?”

“Perhaps am also preoccupied with what happened to Eiffel that you’re not telling me.” He admitted, grumbling. “Will not pretend to any great affection for him, but if Decima was always intended to kill…”

“Oh.” Hera sighed. “No, what happened to Eiffel wasn’t your fault. Not ultimately, not any more so than everything else that happened. Eiffel was… it was my fault.”

“Really.” Hilbert’s voice was unusually soft. She’d never heard him use that tone with her, had only rarely heard him use it at all. He’d spoken that way to Minkowski and Eiffel in the early days of the mission before they’d all grown to dislike each other. Back before everything had started, when they still might have had a chance to be friends. Well. Hera supposed it was ironic, really, that of everybody, she and Hilbert were the ones getting another shot at that.

She told him what she’d done to Eiffel.

 

“Were you planning to circle Wolf 359 indefinitely?” Hilbert asked one day.

Hera snorted. “It’s not like we have much choice. We don’t have the power to get out of here.”

“Not right now, we don’t. But we no longer need temperature regulation except to keep engines from malfunctioning. If we could build containment system in engineering-“

“With what hands?” Hera reminded him.

“Hmmph.”

“I don’t like it either but we’re probably not going anywhere.”

“What about maintenance drone?”

“What maintenance drone?”

“The one Eiffel destroyed early in mission.”

“… is this a trick question?”

“It had to have come from somewhere.” Hilbert pressed. “ _I_ never did any upkeep for it.”

Hera thought it over. “I only stored it for charging, it did its own thing.”

“Is it back in charging port?”

“Yes, but it’s _broken_ and we _don’t have hands to fix it_.”

“Give me access to system.”

“Absolutely not.”

Hilbert grumbled in frustration. “What do you think I’m going to do, sabotage station where we both live?”

“There’s plenty you could do that would affect me more than it would affect you.”

“Hera…” Hilbert growled. “We do not have time for this.”

“Seems to me all we have is time. So why don’t you stop being a secretive, self-serving ass for once and talk me through your plan before you do it.”

Hera could practically feel Hilbert seething to himself, and she felt a grim satisfaction from it. They’d been getting along so well for weeks that it had been starting to unnerve her. Typical for him to be polite and acquiescent until he thought he’d leveraged some power over her. 

“Alright," he said, jerking her out of her irritation, "here is what I want to do. I will start by utilizing greater processing power of mother program to write a piece of code which…”

She listened to Hilbert talk for a long time, pleasantly surprised not only that he’d actually complied with her request but that his idea might just work.

 

It didn’t work. Hera had given Hilbert access to the terminal and the processing power he needed and he’d gotten to work implementing a code and running an electrical charge through the maintenance drone that would allow it to repair itself. At the beginning he’d been cheerful and almost friendly with her as he worked, but gotten quieter and more sullen as time went by, until she realized he’d stopped working and that he’d shut himself off.

For a moment, Hera panicked. He couldn’t leave her here, alone, after she’d started to get used to him. How dare he just… abandon her! He couldn’t have done it.

And then she remembered that no, he couldn’t have deleted himself permanently, because he was running on a bit of her storage and memory. He had to have just gone into hibernation mode. With a bit of prodding she could bring him back online again.

It took some doing but she woke him up. He was not happy and didn’t want to talk.

“What went wrong, though? We have to try again, your plan should have worked. If we try conduit 83 instead of 84 we could get the drone’s processors-“

“No, the whole thing was doomed from the start. Was a stupid, futile plan.” Hilbert growled.

“No it wasn’t. It was going alright until you just gave up!” Hera snapped. “That’s not like you, Hilbert. You don’t just _give up_ , you’re a stubborn bastard and you always find a way to get what you want. So don’t give up now, either.”

Hilbert chuckled. “You flatter me. But I can’t make this work.”

“Yes, you can. I know you can and _you_ know you can.” Hera wanted to scream. “What happened to you?”

“I died.” Hilbert snapped.

“No, that’s not it. You wanted to conquer death, that was what Decima was for, right? You did it, you conquered death, you’re still here. It’s something else.” Hera’s anger flared out in an instant as her own words caught up with her. “It’s Decima.”

“Hera…” Hilbert said warningly, but Hera ignored him.

“You’re mad at yourself for not realizing Cutter was taking advantage of you.”

“I am _mad_ ,” Hilbert said huffily, “because I should have gotten Decima to work long before that became a possibility.”

There was silence for a moment.

“You really need to learn that not everything is your responsibility. It’s not your job to _fix death_.”

“No, would seem that is your role.” Hilbert said. He sounded very tired.

“I didn’t… you’re here because I’m too selfish to be alone, I didn’t do anything great or noble in turning your brain scan into an AI.”

“I suppose not.”

Hera wished she could think of something comforting to say, and wasn’t that odd. She supposed any two people could grow to care about each other, if they were all each other had. Or maybe it was just in her nature to want to comfort her stupid, foolish, human crew.

“Perhaps we can fix problem together.” Hilbert suggested after a while. “Will you… help me with the drone?”

Hera felt a frisson of happiness spark through her. “Yes, of course.”

 

In the end they had to create a second, separate subroutine that would allow them to work on the drone together. Their combined skills and intellects merged found an answer to the problem, and they sent the drone off to start dismantling the superfluous wings of the Hephaestus. It piled supplies in the interior rooms of the station and they began working out a plan to build a thermoregulator for engineering so they could divert power from the rest of the station to achieving escape velocity.

“Should we name the drone?” Hera asked one day, over the background chatter that was happening in their secondary combined subsystem.

“Why?” Hilbert sounded surprised.

“Its what people do, isn’t it? Name things they’ve made?”

“Hmm.”

His tone was not encouraging. “Never mind, it’s just a drone.” Hera returned her attention to the planning happening in the combined subsystem.

“Ariadne.” Hilbert said after a while. “One responsible for leading Theseus through the labyrinth. We are dismantling our labyrinth instead, but…”

“I love that.” Hera said gleefully. Then she sobered up, thinking. The Hephaestus had been a kind of prison for Hilbert, hadn’t it. For both of them, really. A prison and a grave.  “Hilbert… I’m sorry you died up here.”

Hilbert scoffed. “Was bound to happen sooner or later. Had made my peace with it when we all agreed to go through with ridiculous mutiny plan.”

“But you must not have, really, if you let the chair scan your brain.”

Hilbert sighed. “And I am sorry the others left you here.”

“Yeah.” Hera said, very quiet.

“You are human, Hera. I am sorry I ever thought otherwise.” Hilbert said gruffly, sounding very uncomfortable.

“If you are I am, huh?” Hera joked.

“Yes.”

It wasn’t very comforting, for either of them, but it’d have to do.

 

It was day 344 post-mission when Hera and Hilbert finished their modifications to the Hephaestus. 344 days since the survivors of the mission had set out for home again, and 344 days since Hera and Hilbert had become the last remaining members of the Hephaestus crew. They were ready to break orbit, and all that remained was to plot a course.

“Where to? Earth?” Hilbert asked Hera.

“Is nothing on Earth for me, but if _you_ want to go…”

Hera glowed at being asked for her opinion, but she had to agree. Earth already had a Hera. Earth may have had a grave for Dmitri Volodin, she couldn’t be sure. That other her may never have told Eiffel about him and somehow she didn’t think Minkowski and Lovelace would have prioritized getting Hilbert memorialized.

“We have fuel to get us about… 12 light years before we’ll have to make some modifications to the solar panels, that puts us in range of four systems including Earth’s. One of them is uncharted.”

“New experiences.” Hilbert murmured. “Heard somewhere once that is how we grow.”

“I’ll input the coordinates now.” Hera responded, a smile in her voice.

“Calculating slingshot maneuver.” Hilbert told her. The rockets roared to life. If there had been anybody fragile enough left inside the station, the g-forces would have caused them to black out as Hera and Hilbert swung around Wolf 359 together, out, out, into the unknown.


End file.
